


The Eye of the Beholder

by VioletSmith



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blindfolds, Castiel's True Form, Demons, Established Relationship, M/M, True Forms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-25
Updated: 2016-07-25
Packaged: 2018-07-26 15:48:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7580356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VioletSmith/pseuds/VioletSmith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crowley and Castiel experiment with sensory deprivation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Eye of the Beholder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheFierceBeast](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheFierceBeast/gifts).



Crowley was strong, Castiel thought, there was no doubt about that. And he was strong in so many of the various ways a man could be strong. Strong hands placed on Castiel's skin in a parody of divine healing or exorcism, the laying on of hands. Strong arms, shoulders, torso, dense and sturdy. A strong face, for all those delicate features – strong jaw under that lush mouth, those fine cheeks. Strong brow; expressive and distinctive. Strong eyes, glittering and dark, lit from inside like an angel's.

And his character, too, was strong. The sort of strength that yielded when necessary, that survived no matter the cost. His spirit, his essence, the demon inside that handsome vessel: its strength was as clear to Castiel as moonlight, it gleamed out of him, all that reflected glory. A beautiful, terrible sort of strength, like the tensile strength of spider silk.

And so Castiel's impression of him, when blindfolded, was initially one of sheer, unspeakable _power_.

The fabric over his eyes was merely a physical manifestation of a grace-deep binding. A metaphysical darkness that cloaked each of his many eyes. The material was etched with intricate runes, wards that even Castiel had little knowledge of but which Crowley had meticulously mapped out in thin little tracings of his own blood before tying the dark cloth tight and obscuring Castiel's vision utterly.

It had left him unmoored. Oddly anxious at first, this sudden and appalling loss of sight, and he hadn't settled until Crowley had set his hands on him (strong hands, strong and warm and dry, like an autumn leaf fire) and hushed him quiet again.

“I've got you,” he'd said, in that canyon-deep voice, “I've got you, angel,” and Castiel had felt his touch on planes no human could comprehend, that dust-soft touch at the edges of his inner brightness, sure and grounding.

“I can't see you,” Castiel had said, uselessly.

“That's rather the point, yes.”

Castiel had reached out blindly, then, with his hands – panic flitting like a bird in the cage of his chest. He hadn't meant to move, but this blackness was so _new_ , so total...

“Easy, easy.” Crowley caught Castiel's hand between his own and held it firmly. That firmness was reassuring, in ways Castiel had no words for. He felt Crowley start to stroke his hand, warming the skin, warming the angel inside it. It was as if Crowley's touch called him to the surface, had his grace rising and straining towards him unbidden.

It was strange. After so long bound to this vessel, Castiel had begun to _inhabit_ it in a way he had never experienced in all his many years before, so much so that it was only now, with one of his senses entirely blocked on both the physical and spiritual planes, that he was becoming aware again of all the ways in which his true body did not quite fit into the human body he wore over it. The expanses the vessel contained and could not quite contain.

He was hyper aware, it seemed, of the places where Crowley was touching him. As if the loss of one sense had enhanced all the others. He _perceived_ Crowley, but could not see him. He perceived that Crowley was powerful, yes. But also gentle, capable of great delicacy, of tenderness. His hands where they stroked Castiel's bare flank were soft as the padded paws of a great cat, lion-plush, lion-dangerous, all that power...

“How's it feeling, sweetheart?”

Castiel concentrated on making his voice work, his human voice. Concentrated on making words that wouldn't blow out the electric lights, set wind racing about the room. He was so preoccupied with the loss of sight that it felt like more effort than usual to focus on the question, to formulate a response to it. “It's strange. It feels... more.” He wasn't making any sense, but the English language was so desperately inadequate. “I can't-”

“You can,” Crowley cooed, despite having no way of knowing what Castiel was about to say. “Of course you can.”

“Crowley.” Castiel recognised that his voice sounded different to usual; deep and soft, pleading.

“Right here, pet.”

“Don't leave me.”

A pause, and then he felt Crowley squeeze his hand once again.

“Of course not. I'm right here, you can feel me. I'm not going anywhere.”

“It feels so strange. Like being asleep, back when I was human.”

“Surely being asleep didn't frighten you?”

“Not... once I adjusted to it. But it was always strange.”

Another pause, and Castiel wanted so much to see the expression on Crowley's face as he finally said, “I see.”

“This is better,” Castiel rushed to say. “It's better to not be alone.”

He wasn't quite sure why this was the point at which Crowley kissed him. He found he was rarely entirely sure of why Crowley did anything. But he sank into the sensation of it, into the places where Crowley's gentle lips brushed feather soft on his own until he couldn't help but strain up into that touch, his hands blindly groping for Crowley's shoulders, shuddering at the flesh-warm give of bare skin where he'd expected clothes. He felt clumsy. New again, as he'd been the first time he'd summoned the courage to touch his mouth to Crowley's. Crowley had laughed, back then, but it was a kind sort of laugh, the sort of laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes like tinfoil, and he had taken Castiel's borrowed face in his hands and adjusted it to the angle he wanted, holding Castiel still and showing him, with infinite patience, how it was done.

Now Castiel felt, also, the places where Crowley's unhurried touch sank deeper. The invisible places where the blurry edges of them merged, dark and light, fire and air, the places where Crowley touched something elemental in him, those black wisps of him that licked and curled down Castiel's throat and burned his chest like strong alcohol. If he had to describe it to a human, then a kiss was the closest comparison he would have been able to come up with. Like lips and tongue and teeth; though truly Crowley had no mouth and Castiel had many.

Castiel let his hands explore where his eyes could not. Ran them down Crowley's sides, squeezed his waist, warm handfuls of flesh that could never, even blindfolded, be mistaken for human. Not with that power inside him, that energy ticking over below the skin like an idling engine.

“You like this vessel,” Crowley murmured, close to Castiel's ear, voice all smug with it, so sure of Castiel's regard, as if he was easier to read than ever like this.

“Very much,” Castiel replied, gravely serious.

“Like a good suit,” Crowley continued, his breath all hot on the delicate shell of Castiel's ear, his wicked teeth briefly grazing the soft lobe. “And I wear it so well.”

Castiel smiles at that. Shakes his head minutely. “It's more than that.”

“Is it, now?”

“Yes. As mine is to me.”

“And what is yours to you?”

He felt Crowley run a confident finger down his sternum, felt his skin shiver into goosebumps under that touch. Crowley always touched him with utter assurance, almost _ownership_ , as if he thought Castiel belonged to him.

“It's part of me. Like...” He skimmed his hands over Crowley's upper arms, then down the front of his chest. Feeling his way around a body he'd grown intimately familiar with. “It's like a tattoo. I've chosen to make it part of my physical appearance.” He moved closer, into Crowley's arms. Felt them encircle him, felt Crowley's chest hair against his own somewhat smoother skin, the scratch of his facial hair on Castiel's neck where he was mouthing at it, scraping his teeth oh so gently over the muscle. “As have you,” Castiel stammered, swaying a little under Crowley's attention, “with yours.”

“Hmm.” Crowley ran the back of two fingers over the blindfold, and Castiel shuddered. This was powerful magic. Dark and old, thick like clotting blood.

“What made you suggest this?” Castiel asked, lifting a hand to gesture at his blindfolded face.

He felt Crowley shrug. Felt the air that movement displaced.

“The same usual, boring things,” he said, and dug his fingers into Castiel's hips so sharply it caused Cas to suck in a breath. “Wanting to overwhelm you. To make you vulnerable.” And now his kisses were sharper, stronger, biting at Castiel's mouth fiercely, at the rough-stubbled pad of his cheek, at his jaw, the space just behind his ear. Kisses that would leave marks, if Castiel permitted his body to retain them. “Wanting you at my mercy,” he growled, and licked a line up Castiel's throat that left tingles in its wake like static electricity.

“You're beautiful,” Castiel found himself saying, helplessly. He felt Crowley laugh against his skin.

“You can't see a bloody thing.”

“I don't need to.” He fanned his hands over Crowley's face and let just a little of himself out to touch Crowley, to play, to peek up from under the landscape of his human skin like a shy creature, bioluminous like a pilot fish, he let it glow and grow and touch, let it shape itself to Crowley like the sun to an eclipsing moon. “I can feel that you're beautiful,” he rasped, in a voice like thunder. “I can taste it.”

“Oh yes? That's rather kinky.” Crowley sounded almost composed, for all that his voice was a little choked, a little inhuman. “What do I taste like, then, angel?”

Cas smiled, and knew it was a fearsome thing – fixed and strange, a rictus, his vessel slipping like a dress down one shoulder to show glimpses of the bareness beneath.

“Like soot and earth. Like scorched ground, burned bridges. Terrifying. Compelling.”

“How poetic.”

Fingers on the back of his head, then; briefly stroking through his hair, fingertips on his scalp that made Castiel want to arch into that touch like a cat; then the blindfold unfastening, Crowley slipping it from his face. Castiel blinking, owlish and startled, in the sudden brightness. Safely tucked back inside his vessel, locked away, as prim and proper as ever.

He pouts.

“Why did you take it off?”

“Don't pout, feathers,” Crowley says, smiling all fond and indulgent and touching one finger to Castiel's mouth. “I didn't want to push it for this first go. We can always play again another time.”

Castiel takes the scrap of fabric from his hands. Midnight blue, and silky as water. He doesn't want to know what it is made of, what Crowley had to do to obtain it, what it cost him to modify it the way he has.

“I still don't really understand why.”

“It's a human thing. Blindfolds and furry handcuffs and all that. Spicing things up in the bedroom.”

“But we aren't in a bedroom.”

“You know what I mean, don't pretend I've left you with any innocence still in tact.”

Castiel pointedly does not respond to that ridiculous statement. “And we aren't human.”

They don't really do bedroom things, sexual relations, like the humans do. Oh, sure, they've slotted their genitals together in all manner of configurations, and many of them did indeed feel physically pleasurable. But it wasn't the _point_ of it. None of that was, not the transitory high of orgasm or the slow build of pleasure before it, not arousal at the start or the flush of released endorphins afterwards. So for many of their encounters, now, they simply forgo such things. There is no beginning or end, no neat delineation of their time together into _sex_ and _not sex_ , foreplay and afterglow, pain and pleasure, indulgence and deprivation.

Nothing, Castiel maintains, nothing can compare with the ecstasy of communion with your own kind. But this... this sacrilegious trading of favours and intimacies between angel and demon... it compels him in a way nothing has before it.

Crowley is beautiful. Strong. An unholy mingling of the human and the inhuman, bridging the gap between life and afterlife, physical and incorporeal. Castiel is drawn to him as he is drawn to all humanity – helplessly, like a blind thing unable to see the sun but feeling it, still, feeling its heat on his skin. And beneath.


End file.
